


Illusions

by orphan_account



Series: Post-Sburb [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Gen, Implied Relationships, Post-Sburb/Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-21
Updated: 2012-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-05 18:48:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/409795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s like they walk in their own shadows. Sometimes, they look straight at you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Illusions

Sweetie, it isn’t nice to stare. Dear, don’t look at people like that, it’s rude. Darling, why are you glaring at that boy? That isn’t the way a young lady should behave!

You’ve heard some variation on these phrases for most of your life.

It isn’t as if you can help it, but it isn’t as if you can explain your staring, either. You can’t—not to someone who doesn’t see the things you do.

It isn’t everyone. Your mother, for example, appears to you as one single, solid being. You clung to that, when you feared them. She was “normal”, unthreatening, and concrete. Not a being within a spectre, like the others.

Or, your reflection.

That was the first one you saw, and remains to this day the foggiest. All you could, and can, make out is a grey silhouette, occasionally flickering bright white, and glaring back at you with green and yellow eyes. You used to be so frightened of her. You thought perhaps she was a ghost, or a demon, following you through some strange mirror world—you still can’t see her without the aid of a mirror. Others you can see with just your naked eye, though their reflections are almost always clearer.

Growing up, you found yourself both drawn to and repulsed by what you have come to call “ghost-people”. You noticed that if you spoke to them the spectres would become a bit bolder—more real—and that fascinated as well as scared you. For a while you thought that, perhaps, they were possessed. Maybe that meant you had a sixth sense of some sort? You researched in secret, delving into the occult in an attempt to discover just what you were seeing, and why.

You didn’t turn up much. However you soon became certain that, if they were indeed possessed, it was not by what would usually be defined as ghosts; Ghosts don’t usually look so similar to the living, and you were hard-pressed to find a case in which a ghost took the appearance of a grey-skinned creature with horns.

So you gave up on the occult route, though you did come out of it with a new interest in vampiric lore, and a new friend met on one of your frequent excursions to the musty old bookstore.

She was a ghost-person too, and it was she who helped set you on your current career path:

For the longest time, you had a keen interest in many varieties of relationships; what made them work, what caused them to fail, the circumstances under which they began and ended, and how the people involved “meshed” together. You had thought, once, that you might become a relationship counselor. It seemed like the perfect job for you!

That is, until you confided in your friend about the ghost-people.

She was absolutely fascinated. She wanted to hear everything about them, no matter how many times you told her that your own knowledge of them was extremely limited. She would not be deterred. You only barely managed to avoid slipping up and telling her that _she_ was one of the ghost-people she was so interested in.

She suggested that your ghost-people were not occult at all, but psychological in nature; a sort of mental illusion, much like hearing voices—and that, perhaps, to truly understand them and why it was that you saw them, you would have to tackle the issue from a psychological standpoint.

You protested that _she_ was the fount of psychological knowledge, not you, but she would hear none of it. She set you to studying immediately and sure enough, after a few years and a college education, you were a licensed psychologist--something of a specialist, actually.

It didn’t really help the situation. No amount of studying granted you true understanding, and no medication, under or over the counter, could make the ghost-people go away.

In a stunning show of predictability, you soon acquired one of the ghost-people as a patient. Less predictably, both he _and_ the spectre had this reaction upon seeing you:

Recognition.

Something in their gazes told you that he had somehow seen you before, though you did not recall meeting him before in your life. Just the perfect mirroring of their expressions was shocking to you: though it was not strange for the spectres to react to stimuli, it was astounding for this one’s actions to be so similar to its host! It was almost as if the spectre had integrated itself into the patient’s psyche.

When he spoke to you about his symptoms, you felt a surge of optimism; in the beginning, they sounded very similar to your own. You asked leading questions, hoping for confirmation that he, too, saw the ghost-people, but—alas, you soon found your hopes dashed by an unusual case of dissociation.

You still see them, and you probably always will. They’ve become almost mundane now: the sky is blue, the grass is green, and your best friend has a lavender-eyed spectre haunting her.

It’s funny, but sometimes you think you catch the spectre staring at you with an almost adoring expression. Once, you thought you saw a flickering hand reaching out toward that spectre.

Then you blinked, and the hand was gone.

The spectre looked heartbroken.


End file.
